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upstart writes:

Our extinct sister species was hunting and butchering big game, according to new research:

Historical finds of elephant remains alongside stone tools have long prompted speculation among researchers that early humans or other hominin species may have relied on the massive mammals for food.

Now, a team of researchers has determined that Neanderthals in Europe were taking down elephants and methodically butchering them, yielding food stores that would have lasted Neanderthal groups months. Their research is published today in Science Advances.

The bones belonged to straight-tusked elephants, (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), an extinct species about twice the size of African elephants, the largest living land mammals on Earth. Evidence that Neanderthals were hunting the animals in pit traps was discovered in the early 1920s, and in 1948, a specimen was found near 25 flint artifacts and a wooden lance.

[...] "Neanderthals knew what they were doing," wrote Britt Starkovich, an archaeologist at the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment and the University of Tübingen, in an associated Focus article. "They knew which kinds of individuals to hunt, where to find them, and how to execute the attack. Critically, they knew what to expect with a massive butchery effort and an even larger meat return."

Journal Reference:
Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser, Lutz Kindler, Katharine MacDonald, and Wil Roebroeks, Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125.000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behavior [open], Sci Adv, 9, 2023. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.add8186)

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

The National Security Agency is doggedly courting laid-off Big Tech workers as the spy agency undertakes one of its largest hiring surges in the last 30 years:

The NSA began privately reaching out to Big Tech employees over LinkedIn last fall, as word spread that major American companies such as Meta and Amazon were bleeding tens of thousands of skilled workers.

NSA talent management senior strategist Christine Parker said the spy agency also saw predictions of more job cuts, and sprung into action.

"NSA started reaching out through LinkedIn, through some of our career boards, specifically sending messages to people that we thought might be linked to some companies that either were in the news saying they are going to lay-off or were predicted to be laid off," Ms. Parker said in an interview. "Just kind of let them know that we're here and that we have this robust, ongoing hiring program."

[...] The NSA is currently hiring 3,000 new employees to work across the country, from the D.C.-area to Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Texas and Utah, according to Molly Moore, NSA deputy director of workforce support activities.

[...] More than half of the NSA's 3,000 open positions are for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics work. The spy agency, which is focused on signals intelligence collection, is in the market for data and computer scientists, software engineers, cybersecurity experts, human-machine teaming experts, and mathematicians, according to NSA director of operations Natalie Lang.

Related: GM Hiring Tech Talent Laid Off By Silicon Valley Companies

Original Submission

hendrikboom writes:

They observed the brains of computer programmers under fMRI while they were reading code:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow throughout the brain, has been used over the past couple of decades for a variety of applications, including "functional anatomy" — a way of determining which brain areas are switched on when a person carries out a particular task. fMRI has been used to look at people's brains while they're doing all sorts of things — working out math problems, learning foreign languages, playing chess, improvising on the piano, doing crossword puzzles, and even watching TV shows like "Curb Your Enthusiasm."

The new paper built on a 2020 study, written by many of the same authors, which used fMRI to monitor the brains of programmers as they "comprehended" small pieces, or snippets, of code. (Comprehension, in this case, means looking at a snippet and correctly determining the result of the computation performed by the snippet.) The 2020 work showed that code comprehension did not consistently activate the language system, brain regions that handle language processing, explains Fedorenko, a brain and cognitive sciences (BCS) professor and a coauthor of the earlier study. "Instead, the multiple demand network — a brain system that is linked to general reasoning and supports domains like mathematical and logical thinking — was strongly active." The current work, which also utilizes MRI scans of programmers, takes "a deeper dive," she says, seeking to obtain more fine-grained information.

[...] The team carried out a second set of experiments, which incorporated machine learning models called neural networks that were specifically trained on computer programs. These models have been successful, in recent years, in helping programmers complete pieces of code. What the group wanted to find out was whether the brain signals seen in their study when participants were examining pieces of code resembled the patterns of activation observed when neural networks analyzed the same piece of code. And the answer they arrived at was a qualified yes.

How close is this to mind-reading?

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

AI is now used in virtually all areas of science to help researchers with routine classification tasks. It's also helping our team of radio astronomers broaden the search for extraterrestrial life, and results so far have been promising:

As scientists searching for evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth, we have built an AI system that beats classical algorithms in signal detection tasks. Our AI was trained to search through data from radio telescopes for signals that couldn't be generated by natural astrophysical processes.

When we fed our AI a previously studied dataset, it discovered eight signals of interest the classic algorithm missed. To be clear, these signals are probably not from extraterrestrial intelligence, and are more likely rare cases of radio interference.

Nonetheless, our findings – published in Nature Astronomy – highlight how AI techniques are sure to play a continued role in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

[...] If astronomers do manage to detect a technosignature that can't be explained away as interference, it would strongly suggest humans aren't the sole creators of technology within the Galaxy. This would be one of the most profound discoveries imaginable.

Journal Reference: Ma, P.X., Ng, C., Rizk, L. et al. A deep-learning search for technosignatures from 820 nearby stars. Nat Astron (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-022-01872-z

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

FDA posted a recall of EzriCare-branded artificial tears and criticized its maker:

An extensively drug-resistant bacterial strain is spreading in the US for the first time and causing an alarming outbreak linked to artificial tears eye drops, according to an alert released Wednesday evening from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So far, the germ has caused various infections in 55 people in 12 states, killing one and leaving others hospitalized and with permanent vision loss.

Infected patients reported using more than 10 brands of artificial tears collectively, with some patients using multiple brands. But the most common brand used among the patients was EzriCare Artificial Tears, a preservative-free product sold by Walmart, Amazon, and other retailers.

On Thursday, after this story originally published, the Food and Drug Administration posted notice of a recall of EzriCare Artificial Tears and Delsam Pharma's Artificial Tears. The FDA the CDC recommends clinicians and patients stop buying and using the two products. In a separate notice, the FDA further added that the products' manufacturer, Global Pharma Healthcare Private Limited, was in violation of good manufacturing practices, including lack of appropriate microbial testing, formulating its product without an adequate preservative, and lack of proper controls concerning tamper-evident packaging.

[...] In the current outbreak, which began in May 2022, investigators have isolated the outbreak strain from 13 sputum or bronchial washes, 11 cornea swabs, seven urine samples, two blood samples, 25 rectal swabs, and four other nonsterile sources. The patients presented in inpatient and outpatient settings with a range of infections. Those include eye infections—infection of the cornea (keratitis) and infection of tissue or fluids inside the eyeball (endophthalmitis)—to respiratory infections, urinary tract infections, and sepsis. The patient who died had a systemic infection.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

https://www.scienceofintelligence.de/press-release-sheep-are-more-democratic-than-you-think/

Collective motion brings to mind fascinating images, such as the flocks of birds over a corn field, or schools of barracudas as they move in circles in the water. These motions are also particularly appealing to physicists, as the patterns that emerge lend themselves to mathematical and statistical modeling that can help them better understand this phenomenon. When it comes to sheep, many studies describe the collective behavior in sheep flocks as a self-organized process where individuals continuously adapt their direction and speed to follow the motion and collective decisions of the group – as if the only leading force were the "collective brain" itself. This view, however, does not take into account that animals do not move continuously, or the possible hierarchies existing in many animal groups and the potential benefits of having a single individual lead the way.

[...] According to Gómez-Nava and collaborators, when the sheep stop to feed or rest between one collective motion phase and the next, they randomly pick a new group leader for the next round of flocking, thus transferring control to a new individual each time. In this way, individuals take turns being leaders and the flock's collective intelligence is achieved democratically, over many collective motion phases.

upstart writes:

NASA has a plan to "skip a generation" of passenger aircraft design to fight climate change:

After more than 50 years in production, the final 747 is taking to the skies.

Boeing delivered the last 747 ever built to Atlas Air on Tuesday. Aviation enthusiast John Travolta was there and said the plane was the "most well-thought-out and safest aircraft ever built." Richard Branson said "farewell to a wonderful beast" in a Reuters interview, bemoaning the high fuel costs for transatlantic flights on the jumbo jet. Airlines had a similar attitude, as slowing 747 sales reflected higher demand for smaller, more fuel-efficient planes. In fact, sustainability is on Boeing's mind as well.

[...] Unlike cars, you can't simply bolt a battery onto a plane and make it electric. (Making an electric vehicle is more complicated than that, but you get the point.) Improvements to airplanes happen in small increments over the course of decades. Typically, a single-digit reduction in an aircraft's fuel consumption would be meaningful. Boeing says the innovations in the new truss-braced wing concept will amount to a 30 percent reduction. That's exactly the kind of leap NASA wanted to get out of the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project, which Boeing won.

The big idea behind the transonic truss-braced wing concept is an update to the aircraft configuration, or the plane's architecture. Unlike the low-wing design that dominates the commercial aircraft configuration today, the new Boeing design has wings that stretch over the top of the plane's tubular body. This reduces drag, but it also allows for a wider variety of propulsion systems, from bigger jet engines to exposed propellers. It's also fast. The "transonic" part of the concept's name refers to its ability to fly just shy of the speed of sound, or around 600 miles per hour.

mrpg writes:

A Unique Discovery: Researchers Have Uncovered an Ultra-Rare Piece of Evidence That Dinosaurs Ate Mammals

New research on the preserved gut contents of Microraptor reveals a more varied diet than previously believed:

[...] A recent study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology details the discovery of a mouse-sized mammal foot inside the gut contents of a Microraptor zhaoianus, a small feathered dinosaur from the early Cretaceous period. This is a rare and unique find, as there is only one previous report of a dinosaur with mammalian gut contents, and it's not closely related to Microraptor.

[...] Previous Microraptor specimens from this area have been found with gut contents of a fish, bird, and lizard, indicating that these small dinosaurs had diverse diets. However, it remains unclear whether Microraptor consumed the contents in a predator-prey relationship or by scavenging. Researchers can only say conclusively that Microraptor was carnivorous.

Sullivan says information about dinosaurs' diets is a key piece in the puzzle to learning more about what was going on at the time they roamed the Earth.

Journal Reference:
David W. E. Hone, T. Alexander Dececchi, Corwin Sullivan, et al., Generalist diet of Microraptor zhaoianus included mammals, J Vertebr Paleo, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02724634.2022.2144337

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

John Brodkin at Ars Technica is reporting on the shady practices of ISPs.

Ryan Grewell, who runs a small wireless Internet service provider in Ohio, last month received an email that confirmed some of his worst suspicions about cable companies.

Grewell, founder and general manager of Smart Way Communications, had heard from some of his customers that the Federal Communications Commission's new broadband map falsely claimed fiber Internet service was available at their homes from another company called Jefferson County Cable. Those customer reports spurred Grewell to submit a number of challenges to the FCC in an attempt to correct errors in Smart Way's service area.

One of Grewell's challenges elicited a response from Jefferson County Cable executive Bob Loveridge, who apparently thought Grewell was a resident at the challenged address rather than a competitor.

"You challenged that we do not have service at your residence and indeed we don't today," Loveridge wrote in a January 9 email that Grewell shared with Ars. "With our huge investment in upgrading our service to provide xgpon we reported to the BDC [Broadband Data Collection] that we have service at your residence so that they would not allocate addition [sic] broadband expansion money over [the] top of our private investment in our plant."
[...]
Speaking to Ars in a phone interview, Grewell said, "This cable company happened to just say the quiet part out loud." He called it "a blatant attempt at blocking anyone else from getting funding in an area they intend to serve."

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/01/understanding-x86s-decimal-adjust-after.html

I've been looking at the DAA machine instruction on x86 processors, a special instruction for binary-coded decimal arithmetic. Intel's manuals document each instruction in detail, but the DAA description doesn't make much sense. I ran an extensive assembly-language test of DAA on a real machine to determine exactly how the instruction behaves. In this blog post, I explain how the instruction works, in case anyone wants a better understanding.

The DAA (Decimal Adjust AL1 after Addition) instruction is designed for use with packed BCD (Binary-Coded Decimal) numbers. The idea behind BCD is to store decimal numbers in groups of four bits, with each group encoding a digit 0-9 in binary. You can fit two decimal digits in a byte; this format is called packed BCD. For instance, the decimal number 23 would be stored as hex 0x23 (which turns out to be decimal 35).

The 8086 doesn't implement BCD addition directly. Instead, you use regular binary addition and then DAA fixes the result. For instance, suppose you're adding decimal 23 and 45. In BCD these are 0x23 and 0x45 with the binary sum 0x68, so everything seems straightforward. But, there's a problem with carries. For instance, suppose you add decimal 26 and 45 in BCD. Now, 0x26 + 0x45 = 0x6b, which doesn't match the desired answer of 0x71. The problem is that a 4-bit value has a carry at 16, while a decimal digit has a carry at 10. The solution is to add a correction factor of the difference, 6, to get the correct BCD result: 0x6b + 6 = 0x71.

Intel Cuts Pay to Cut Costs

upstart writes:

Intel Cuts Pay to Cut Costs:

New intel from Intel says that some employees at the company will be taking a pay cut—even the CEO.

Layoffs are ravaging the tech industry due to the wildly abstract threat posed by "the economy," but Intel is taking a different approach. Instead of laying off thousands of its workforce, the company has seemingly decided to make sweeping pay cuts from 5% to 25%.

Dylan Patel first reported on the pay cuts in his newsletter SemiAnalysis yesterday. Patel says that multiple employees have relayed to him that Intel is looking to cut costs to meet its quarterly dividend, and some employees are the ones footing the bill. According to a source within Intel, employees below and including Principal Engineer will be receiving a 5% pay cut with the exception of hourly and junior-level employees, who will not be affected by the cuts. Glassdoor and a Google Jobs posting reveal that Principal Engineers can make upwards of $170,000 at a minimum.

Likewise, VPs are taking a 10% hit, the executive leadership team is taking a 15% cut, and CEO Pat Geslinger will cut his salary by 25%. In addition to the pay cuts, there will be no quarterly or annual bonuses for now, merit-based raises are paused, and 401k match is is being reduced from 5% to 2.5%. Intel is still reportedly planning to lay off several hundred employees in California according to local media, which is still drastically less than other tech companies.

And it isn't only pay that is being cut...

upstart writes:

Twitter is replacing free access to its API with a new paid tier:

Twitter will no longer provide free access to the Twitter API from February 9th. As announced by the official Twitter Developer account late Wednesday night, Elon Musk's social media hobby will stop supporting free access to the Twitter API and will instead provide a "paid basic tier." Twitter hasn't provided any information regarding pricing, but said that it will provide "more details on what you can expect next week."

[...] Twitter's API — abbreviated from Application Programming Interface — allows third parties to retrieve and analyze public Twitter data, which can then be used to create programmable bots and separate applications that connect to the platform, such as Pikaso, Thread Reader, and RemindMe_OfThis. Twitter currently provides limited free access to its API alongside premium, scalable tiers for developers that need to lift restrictions on accessing endpoints and unlock additional enterprise features. Twitter does not publicly disclose the price of its premium API tiers, though it was reported in February last year that fees start from $99 a month and increase depending on the level of access required.

[...] Many small developers have used Twitter's free API access to create fun tools and useful bots like novelty weather trackers and black-and-white image colorizers which are not intended to earn income or turn a profit. As a result, it's likely that many bots and tools utilizing Twitter's free API access will need to charge a fee or be shut down. It would also impact third parties like students and scientists who use the platform to study online behavior and gather information for research papers.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mummification specialists had distinct concoctions for specific parts of the body:

Scientists have unwrapped long-sought details of embalming practices that ancient Egyptians used to preserve dead bodies.

Clues came from analyses of chemical residue inside vessels from the only known Egyptian embalming workshop and nearby burial chambers. Mummification specialists who worked there concocted specific mixtures to embalm the head, wash the body, treat the liver and stomach, and prepare bandages that swathed the body, researchers report February 1 in Nature.

"Ancient Egyptian embalmers had extensive chemical knowledge and knew what substances to put on the skin to preserve it, even without knowing about bacteria and other microorganisms," Philipp Stockhammer, an archaeologist at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, said at a January 31 news conference.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

After being acquired by Red Ventures, staff say editorial firewalls have been repeatedly breached:

Last October, CNET's parent company, Red Ventures, held a cross-department meeting to discuss the AI writing software it had been building for months. The tool had been in testing internally ahead of public use on CNET, and Red Ventures' early results revealed several potential issues.

[...] Red Ventures executives laid out all of these issues at the meeting and then made a fateful decision: CNET began publishing AI-generated stories anyway.

"They were well aware of the fact that the AI plagiarized and hallucinated," a person who attended the meeting recalls. (Artificial intelligence tools have a tendency to insert false information into responses, which are sometimes called "hallucinations.") "One of the things they were focused on when they developed the program was reducing plagiarism. I suppose that didn't work out so well."

[...] Multiple former employees told The Verge of instances where CNET staff felt pressured to change stories and reviews due to Red Ventures' business dealings with advertisers. The forceful pivot toward Red Ventures' affiliate marketing-driven business model — which generates revenue when readers click links to sign up for credit cards or buy products — began clearly influencing editorial strategy, with former employees saying that revenue objectives have begun creeping into editorial conversations.

Reporters, including on-camera video hosts, have been asked to create sponsored content, making staff uncomfortable with the increasingly blurry lines between editorial and sales. One person told The Verge that they were made aware of Red Ventures' business relationship with a company whose product they were covering and that they felt pressured to change a review to be more favorable.

Original Submission

China balloon: US shoots down airship over Atlantic

The US has shot down a giant Chinese balloon that it says has been spying on key military sites across America.

The Department of Defense confirmed its fighter jets brought down the balloon over US territorial waters.

Three airports were shut and airspace was closed off the coast of North and South Carolina as the military carried out the operation on Saturday.

Footage on US TV networks showed the balloon falling to the sea after a small explosion.

An F-22 jet fighter engaged the high-altitude balloon with one missile - an AIM-9X Sidewinder - and it went down about six nautical miles off the US coast at 14:39 EST (19:39 GMT), a defence official told reporters.

US President Joe Biden had been under pressure to shoot the balloon down since defence officials first announced they were tracking it on Thursday.

Second balloon spotted over Latin America:

On Friday, the Pentagon said a second Chinese spy balloon had been spotted - this time over Latin America with reported sightings over Costa Rica and Venezuela.